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About

I'm a Chicago area librarian, dad of four, and long-time middle school Sunday School teacher. I don't have any particular training in education or ministry, other than various workshops, self-study, and long years of experience. This blog is my modest attempt to memorialize and share some of the lessons I've created over the years, in an attempt to be be helpful to other teachers scrambling to come up with ideas for their classes.For those interested in my theological perspective, it's fairly traditional and historical. But in general my guiding philosophy is summed up in this quote from Joel Osteen Ministries: "Your job isn’t to judge. Your job isn’t to figure out if someone deserves something or decide who is right or wrong. Your job is to lift the fallen, restore the broken, and heal the hurting."In general these lessons were designed for smaller classes, from four or so kids to eight. They attempt to be practical, focused and age-appropriate. There's not a lot of sharing of feelings, extemporaneous praying, or other things that so many curricula seem to favor. I've never had a kid in my classes who liked that kind of stuff (and I'm not too crazy about it either). As you can see from my Learning Objectives, my goals are fairly limited - acquainting kids with the basics of our faith in a coherent, fun and interesting way that is more mature than the story-oriented experience of the primary grades.

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Life is Beautiful

"There’s a line from the play “Our Town,” by Thornton Wilder, that I have never forgotten. The main character, Emily, dies, but gets to go back and live through one day. As the rest of her family stumbles about their business, she is bursting with wonder:

EMILY: Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?STAGE MANAGER: No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some."